Subaltern

(postcolonialism)

In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the
colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy
of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio
Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces
specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to
deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies
entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies
Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the common people who constitute
the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic
elites in the history of India. [1]
 Antonio Gramsci coined the term
subaltern to explain the socio-
economic status of "the native" in an
imperial colony.

As a method of investigation and analysis of the political role of subaltern populations, Karl
Marx's theory of history presents colonial history from the perspective of the proletariat; that the
who? and the what? of social class are determined by the economic relations among the social
classes of a society. Since the 1970s, the term subaltern denoted the colonized peoples of the
Indian subcontinent, imperial history told from below, from the perspective of the colonised
peoples, rather than from the perspective of the colonisers from Western Europe. By the 1980s,
the Subaltern Studies method of historical enquiry was applied to South Asian historiography. As
a method of intellectual discourse, the concept of the subaltern originated as a Eurocentric
method of historical enquiry for the study of non-Western peoples (of Africa, Asia, and the
Middle East) and their relation to Western Europe as the centre of world history. Subaltern
studies became the model for historical research of the subaltern's experience of colonialism in
the Indian subcontinent.[2]

Denotations
In postcolonial theory, the term subaltern describes the lower social classes and the Other social
groups displaced to the margins of a society; in an imperial colony, a subaltern is a native man or
woman without human agency, as defined by his and her social status.[3] Nonetheless, the
feminist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cautioned against an over-broad application of the
term the subaltern, because the word:

subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for [the] Other, for somebody
who's not getting a piece of the pie ... . In post-colonial terms, everything that has
limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference.
Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's
not subaltern ... .
Many people want to claim [the condition of] subalternity. They are the least
interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against
minority on the university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern' ... . They
should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the
hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them
speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.[4]

In Marxist theory, the civil sense of the term subaltern was first used by Antonio Gramsci (1891–
1937). In discussions of the meaning of the term subaltern in the work of Gramsci, Spivak said
that he used the word as a synonym for the proletariat (a code word to deceive the prison censor
to allow his manuscripts out the prison),[5] but contemporary evidence indicates that the term
was a novel concept in Gramsci's political theory.[6] The postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha
emphasized the importance of social power relations in defining subaltern social groups as
oppressed, racial minorities whose social presence was crucial to the self-definition of the
majority group; as such, subaltern social groups, nonetheless, also are in a position to subvert
the authority of the social groups who hold hegemonic power.[7]

In Toward a New Legal Common Sense (2002), the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos
applied the term subaltern cosmopolitanism to describe the counter-hegemonic practice of
social struggle against Neoliberalism and globalization, especially the struggle against social
exclusion. Moreover, de Sousa Santos applied subaltern cosmopolitanism as interchangeable
with the term cosmopolitan legality to describe the framework of diverse norms meant to realise
an equality of differences, wherein the term subaltern identifies the oppressed peoples, at the
margins of society, who are struggling against the hegemony of economic globalization.
Context, time, and place determine who, among the marginalised peoples, is a subaltern; in India,
women, Shudras and Dalits (also known as Untouchables), and rural migrant labourers are part
of the subaltern social stratum.
Theory
Postcolonial theory studies the power and the continued dominance of Western ways of
intellectual enquiry, the methods of generating knowledge. In the book Orientalism (1978),
Edward Said conceptually addresses the oppressed subaltern native to explain how the
Eurocentric perspective of Orientalism produced the ideological foundations and justifications
for the colonial domination of the Other. Before their actual explorations of The Orient,
Europeans had invented imaginary geographies of the Orient; predefined images of the savage
peoples and exotic places that lay beyond the horizon of the Western world. The mythologies of
Orientalism were reinforced by travellers who returned from Asia to Europe with reports of
monsters and savage lands, which were based upon the conceptual difference and strangeness
of the Orient; such cultural discourses about the Oriental Other were perpetuated through the
mass communications media of the time, and created an Us-and-Them binary social relation
with which the Europeans defined themselves by defining the differences between the Orient
and the Occident. As a foundation of colonialism, the Us-and-Them binary social relation
misrepresented the Orient as backward and irrational lands, and, therefore, in need of the
European civilizing mission, to help them become modern, in the Western sense; hence, the
Eurocentric discourse of Orientalism excludes the voices of the subaltern natives, the Orientals,
themselves.[8][9]

The cultural theorist Stuart Hall said that the power of cultural discourse created and reinforced
Western dominance of the non-Western world. That the European discourses describing the
differences between The West and The East, applied European cultural categories, languages,
and ideas to represent the non-European Other. The knowledge produced by such discourses
became social praxis, which then became reality; by producing a discourse of difference, Europe
maintained Western dominance over the non-European Other, using a binary social relation that
created and established the Subaltern native, realised by excluding The Other from the
production of discourse, between the East and the West.[10]
The voice of the subaltern
In Geographies of Post colonialism (2008), Joanne Sharp developed Spivak's line of reasoning
that Western intellectuals displace to the margin of intellectual discourse the non–Western
forms of "knowing" by re-formulating, and thus intellectually diminishing, such forms of
acquiring knowledge as myth and folklore. To be heard and to be known, the subaltern native
must adopt Western ways of knowing (language, thought, reasoning); because of such
Westernization, a subaltern people can never express their native ways of knowing, and, instead,
must conform their native expression of knowledge to the Western, colonial ways of knowing
the world.[11] The subordinated native can be heard by the colonisers only by speaking the
language of their empire; thus, intellectual and cultural filters of conformity muddle the true
voice of the subaltern native. For example, in Colonial Latin America, the subordinated natives
conformed to the colonial culture, and used the linguistic filters of religion and servitude when
addressing their Spanish imperial rulers. To make effective appeals to the Spanish Crown, slaves
and natives would address the rulers in ways that masked their own, native ways of speaking.

Indian philosopher and theorist Gayatri

Spivak, seen here giving a speech at the
Internationaler Kongress in Berlin

The historian Fernando Coronil said that his goal as an investigator must be "to listen to the
subaltern subjects, and to interpret what I hear, and to engage them and interact with their
voices. We cannot ascend to a position of dominance over the voice, subjugating its words to
the meanings we desire to attribute to them. That is simply another form of discrimination. The
power to narrate somebody's story is a heavy task, and we must be cautious and aware of the
complications involved."[12] Like Spivak, bell hooks questions the academic's engagement with
the non–Western Other. That in order to truly communicate with the subaltern native, the
academic would have to remove him or herself as "the expert" at the center of the Us-and-Them
binary social relation. Traditionally, the academic wants to learn of the subaltern native's
experiences of colonialism, but does not want to know the subaltern's (own) explanation of his
or her experiences of colonial domination. In light of the mechanics of Western knowledge,
hooks said that a true explanation can come only from the expertise of the Western academic,
thus, the subaltern native surrenders knowledge of colonialism to the investigating academic.
About the binary relationship of investigation, between the academic and the subaltern native,
hooks said that:

[There is] no need to hear your [native] voice, when I can talk about you better
than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about
your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new
way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing
you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still [the] colonizer, the
speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk.[13]

As a means of constructing a great history of society, the story of the subaltern native is a
revealing examination of the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the subaltern
man and the subaltern woman, the most powerless people living within the socio-economic
confines of imperialism; therefore, the academic investigator of post-colonialism must not
assume cultural superiority when studying the voices of the subaltern natives.

Development discourse
Mainstream development discourse, which is based upon knowledge of colonialism and
Orientalism, concentrates upon modernization theory, wherein the modernization of an
underdeveloped country should follow the path to modernization taken (and established) by the
developed countries of the West. As such, modernization is characterized by free trade, open
markets, capitalist economic systems, and democratic systems of governance, as the means by
which a nation should modernize their country en route to becoming a developed country in the
Western style. Therefore, mainstream development discourse concentrates upon the application
of universal social and political, economic and cultural policies that would nationally establish
such modernization.[14]

In Making Development Geography (2007), Victoria Lawson presents a critique of mainstream

development discourse as mere recreation of the Subaltern, which is effected by means of the
subaltern being disengaged from other social scales, such as the locale and the community; not
considering regional, social class, ethnic group, sexual- and gender-class differences among the
peoples and countries being modernized; the continuation of the socio-cultural treatment of the
subaltern as a subject of development, as a subordinate who is ignorant of what to do and how
to do it; and by excluding the voices of the subject peoples from the formulations of policy and
practice used to effect the modernization.[14]

As such, the subaltern are peoples who have been silenced in the administration of the colonial
states they constitute, they can be heard by means of their political actions, effected in protest
against the discourse of mainstream development, and, thereby, create their own, proper forms
of modernization and development. Hence do subaltern social groups create social, political,
and cultural movements that contest and disassemble the exclusive claims to power of the
Western imperialist powers, and so establish the use and application of local knowledge to
create new spaces of opposition and alternative, non-imperialist futures.[14]

References

1. David Ludden (ed) Reading Subaltern

Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning
and the Globalisation of South Asia. Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2003.

2. Prakash, Gyan. "Subaltern Studies as

Postcolonial Criticism", The American
Historical Review, December, 1994, Vol. 99,
No. 5, pp. 1475–1490, and p. 1476.
3. Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: A Very
Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003.

4. de Kock, Leon. "Interview With Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers
Conference in South Africa." ARIEL: A
Review of International English Literature (h
ttp://ariel.synergiesprairies.ca/ariel/index.p
hp/ariel/article/viewFile/2505/2458)
Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/201
10706205400/http://ariel.synergiesprairies.
ca/ariel/index.php/ariel/article/viewFile/25
05/2458) 2011-07-06 at the Wayback
Machine. 23(3) 1992: 29-47. ARIEL
5. Morton, Stephen. "The Subaltern:
Genealogy of a Concept", in Gayatri Spivak:
Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of
Postcolonial Reason. Malden, MA: Polity,
2007: pp. 96-97; and Hoare, Quintin, and
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. "Terminology", in
Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New
York: International Publishers, pp. xiii-xiv

6. Green, Marcus E. "Rethinking the Subaltern

and the Question of Censorship in
Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (https://www.a
cademia.edu/1548708/Rethinking_the_sub
altern_and_the_question_of_censorship_in_
Gramscis_Prison_Notebooks) ,"
Postcolonial Studies, Volume 14, Number 4
(2011): 385-402.
7. Garcia-Morena, Laura and Pfeiffer, Peter C.
Eds. "Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular
Cosmopolitanism", Text and Nation: Cross-
Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and
National Identities. Columbia, SC: Camden
House, 1996: pp. 191–207 and "Unpacking
my library ... again", The Post-colonial
Question: Common Skies, Divided
Horizons. Iain Chambers, Lidia Curti, eds.
New York: Routledge, 1996: 210.

8. Race and Racialization: Essential Readings

by T. Das Gupta, et al. (eds). Toronto:
Canadian Scholars Press. 2007.

9. Sharp, Joanne. Geographies of

Postcolonialism, chapter 1, On Orientalism.
SAGE Publications. 2008.
10. Hall, S. "The West and the Rest: Discourse
and Power". Race and Racialization:
Essential Readings. Das Gupta, T. et al
(eds). Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
2007.

11. Sharp, Joanne Geographies of

Postcolonialism, Chapter 6: Can the
Subaltern Speak? SAGE Publications, 2008,
p. 000.

12. Coronil, Fernando (1994). "Listening to the

Subaltern: The Poetics of Neocolonial
States". Poetics Today. 4. 15 (4): 643–658.
doi:10.2307/1773104 (https://doi.org/10.2
307%2F1773104) . JSTOR 1773104 (http
s://www.jstor.org/stable/1773104) .
13. hooks, bell. "Marginality as a Site of
Resistance", in R. Ferguson et al. (eds), Out
There: Marginalization and Contemporary
Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990: pp.
241-43.

14. Lawson, Victoria. Making Development

Geography. UK: Hodder Education, 2007.

Bibliography

Dube, Saurabh / Seth, Sanjay / Skaria,

Ajay (Ed.): Dipesh Chakrabarty and the
Global South: Subaltern Studies,
Postcolonial Perspectives, and the
Anthropocene, Routledge, London/New
York 2020.
Darder, Antonia: Decolonizing Interpretive
Research: A Subaltern Methodology for
Social Change, Routledge, London/New
York 2019.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa: Toward a

New Legal Common Sense, 2nd ed.
(London: LexisNexis Butterworths),
particularly, 2002: 458–493.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh: Habitations of

Modernity: Essays in the Wake of
Subaltern Studies. University of Chicago
Press 2002.

Rodríguez, Ileana: The Latin American

subaltern studies reader. Duke University
Press, North Carolina 2001.
Guha, Ranajit: Subaltern Studies Reader,
1986-1995. University of Minnesota
Press 1997.

Bhabha, Homi K.: "Unsatisfied: notes on

vernacular cosmopolitanism." In: Text
and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on
Cultural and National Identities. Ed. Laura
Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer.
Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996:
191-207.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: "Can the

Subaltern Speak?". In: Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg.
 Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1988: 271-313.

External links

Contemporary Postcolonial and

Postimperial Literature (http://www.post
colonialweb.org/)

Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak (https://web.archive.
org/web/20151206101626/http://www.
mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_th
e_subaltern_speak.pdf)

Subaltern.org: An organization for

underrepresented artists. (https://web.a
rchive.org/web/20051226152849/htt
p://www.subaltern.org/)
The website defines "Subaltern" in
the following manner: "Originally a
term for subordinates in military
hierarchies, the term subaltern is
elaborated in the work of Antonio
Gramsci to refer to groups who are
outside the established structures
of political representation. In 'Can
the Subaltern Speak?' Gayatri
Spivak suggests that the subaltern
is denied access to both mimetic
and political forms of
representation."
 Subaltern studies bibliography (http://w
ww.lib.virginia.edu/area-studies/subalte
rn/ssauth.htm)

Biography and major publications for

Spivak. (https://scholarblogs.emory.ed
u/postcolonialstudies/)

Voices from the Aapravasi Ghat, Khal

TOrabully,
http://www.potomitan.info/torabully/voi
ces.php

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